


Ice

by Shatterpath



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-10-15
Updated: 2005-10-15
Packaged: 2017-10-25 20:07:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/274246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shatterpath/pseuds/Shatterpath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura's internal landscape changes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ice

**Author's Note:**

> Written between 12:06 to 12:23 on 10-15-05. Never actually seen the ep hinted at here, but the image sticks with me from pictures. As I live in Seattle, the forest she is wandering in is intimately familiar and welcome. The waterfall is inspired by Snoqualmie Falls, just outside my fair city. Thanks for the inspiration! I always get a kick out of what my brain will spew under pressure.
> 
> Missing scene to an early episode I cannot remember. Sorry!
> 
> Word count: 459  
> Unbetaed, only a spell checker was used. I didn’t even reread it.
> 
> Today's challenge (for fanfic or artwork) is a 30-minute fic type word challenge.
> 
> Rules: the word is behind the LJ-cut. When you click the cut and read the word, you then have 30 minutes to write a fic inspired by the word. Don't worry about plot--just write for thirty minutes, in character.
> 
> I look forward to seeing what comes up. (From MinervaFan)
> 
> The Challenge Word is: Ice

The dream always started out the same way.

Deep forest, the gnarled trunks driving straight and tall into the dark sky, mist swirling in an impenetrable fog well below the branch line. Ferns stood sentinel over the spongy ground, her shoes crept my weight soundlessly over the terrain.

Always alone here. Except for that one time. The traitor had crossed over between sleep and waking, between real and mindscape. Pinning her to the trunk of that silent tree, hand muffling her cry, stifling her breath.

Now it was winter here, the icy wind biting through the virginal nightgown, leaving her feeling naked and vulnerable. If this place had ever felt safe, it certainly didn’t now. That bastard had violated the feeling of refuge, sent shadows to flicker among the once-sheltering trees, the creeping ferns.

Winter lay heavily on the terrain of her soul, reflected in the starkness of this once-friendly, if not mysterious, place.

But there were more surprises here, than just him.

A grumble, a low roar that trembled through the ground, made the trees shiver in awareness and the fern shudder with glee. Like stones grinding themselves into lava, and making the benign-seeming crust of dirt above dance in earthquake relief. This rumble went on and on, like a note of creation, sustained through the ages, harmonizing with her breath white in the icy air.

Hesitantly, but unresisting, she went to the sound, the pulse of blood in this mysterious forest.

The mist thickened, the cold numbing hands, feet, nose, mouth, eyes stinging. It moved among the endless tree trunks, swamped over the patchy snow, caressed the ferns, melted the stubborn, clinging ice.

Soon, it moved like a storm, a great white wave like stampeding animals running from the grumble that had grown to a constant roar of power.

Then she found it.

There, in the heart of this violated place, where winter and ice could find no foothold, where the glorious, unfettered power of this place, outside and inside, could thunder with no fetters.

Water, icy but not ice, implacable, unstoppable, making its own way, its own terrain.

She wept then, her tears flowing with joy in concert to the vast wall of foaming water that plunged from its stark cliff of doubt and through the open air of hope.

This enormous waterfall was to be her place of strength now.

With a jerk, Laura woke, jerking her head off her desk, blinking in delirious confusion at the familiar and yet utterly foreign interior of the Colonial One. The roar of the waterfall was still there, in her skull and heart and bones. Comforting and powerful, it would sustain her. There were tears on her face, and her hands and feet and nose felt like ice.

THE END


End file.
